Print Spooling with auto-hold

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Stephen Samuel <samnospam at gmail.com> wrote (Thursday 27 July 2006 02:45):

> What I'm trying to do should be relatively simple.
> 
> I'd like to set up print queues for a print/copy shop where people print to "the printer", but the job
> is always held until somebody (usually the sales clerk) manually releases the job to the printer.
> 
> Question is: what's the best  way to do this?  I need something that's gonna be relatively clean for
> someone who may be a *complete* newbie (i.e. a drag&drop type GUI interface would be perfect.
> 
> The best that i can think of would be to have two queues -- one 'fake', and the other one actually
> attached to the printer, so you have to move (lpmove?)  from the 'held' queue to the 'printing' queue to
> actually print the job.
> 
> Anything better that people can think of?


Untested, from the top (back?, bottom?, middle?) of my head:

Put into /etc/cups/lpoptions (and into every $HOME/.lpoptions file of
each user) this line:

   Dest your_printer_name job-hold-until=indefinite

For releasing the job, you can use the commandline, the CUPS web 
interface, or KDEPrint's "kjobviewer". (Just make sure that all the
privileges are OK for all the people/usernames who are going to deal
with this.)

Cheers,
Kurt